Robert Ross
Robert “Bobby” Ross is the CEO and co-founder of FireHydrant. Formerly of Namely, DigitalOcean, and Thunderbolt Labs. Based in New York City, enjoys a great cocktail, bleeding-edge tech, and making software that helps teams build better systems.
Avoid frostbite: Stop doing code freezes
A code freeze is intentionally halting changes to your codebase and environments in an effort to reduce the risk of an outage.On the surface, pausing on deployments feels like a logical solution to preventing incidents. Unfortunately, this isn't the case. Read more
Robert Ross 2021-11-11Reliability is not an engineering metric
Reliability is not a metric that engineering alone controls, everyone in the business has a substantial stake in the reliability your customers feel. Read more
Robert Ross 2021-09-30Getting Started with Site Reliability Engineering
This is a quick primer to get started in Site Reliability Engineering if you're interested in becoming a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE). Read more
Robert Ross 2021-08-16We’ve raised a $23M Series B to help us get to a world where all software is reliable
We envision a world where all software is reliable, and we’re on a mission to help every company that builds or operates software get closer to 100% reliability. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised $23 million to help us further our goal. Read more
Robert Ross 2021-08-10Pragmatic Incident Response: 3 Lessons Learned from Failures
Lessons learned from the front line that you actually immediately use in your incident management process. Read more
Robert Ross 2021-07-15The MTTR that matters
We're over MTTR(esolution), but have you thought about MTTR(etro)? Read more
Robert Ross 2021-06-10Four things to consider when evaluating incident management platforms
Four things to consider when evaluating incident management platforms--from whether you have the culture and process to support a potential tool, to understanding your pain points, to knowing which key stakeholders to involve. Read more
Robert Ross 2021-05-26Alert Fatigue and Your Health
Alert fatigue can not only cost not only cause more errors and financially impact your business but can also be detrimental to your health. This post goes over how alert fatigue manifests and some ideas on how to combat it, Read more
Robert Ross 2021-03-09It's Time We Throw Out the Usage of 'Postmortem'
Why are we using the term 'postmortem' when no one died? In any other job, conducting a postmortem means someone perished, so we need to switch to another phrase to lessen the gruesomeness of software incidents. I wanted to provide some ideas that your organization could possibly run with as a replacement to “Postmortem.” Read more
Robert Ross 2021-02-10New Feature: Incident Types
Incidents are inevitable, and the reality is some of them are inevitably going to repeat themselves. Common incident types were slightly burdensome for our customers, so we're announcing an easy way to declare incidents using templates. Read more
Robert Ross 2021-01-272021 is the Year of Reliability
We all know it: You expect your software tools to work every time, all the time. Let's do better this year - there’s no better time than now to dedicate effort to fireproofing your software. Read more
Robert Ross 2021-01-19The Final Episode - Episode 10 of Throughput Thursdays
We made it to our final episode! Thank you to everyone that tuned in and watched Bobby get a Terraform provider up and running. We hope you enjoyed watching me through the good, bad, and ugly these past 20 or so hours. Read more
Robert Ross 2020-12-04Configuring a Runbook - Episode 9 of Throughput Thursdays
In episode 9 of Throughput Thursdays, we work to configure a Runbook and get it to work! Watch part 1 of our two-part finale below to see what happens. Read more
Robert Ross 2020-11-20Breaking down the interface - Episode 8 of Throughput Thursdays
In episode 8 of Throughput Thursdays, we break down all the logically grouped pieces into their own interfaces and create an interface on our client that can return. Read more
Robert Ross 2020-11-13More New Terraform Resources - Episode 7 of Throughput Thursdays
In episode 7, we create resources for managing teams and severities through the Terraform provider, which means we now can now manage more of users’ FireHydrant configurations with code. Read more
Robert Ross 2020-10-30Creating a Data Source - Episode 6 of Throughput Thursdays
In Episode 6, we update our Terraform resource for FireHydrant functionalities and create a data source for FireHydrant services. This allows us to pull services from a list and link them to functionalities. Linking resources like this lets us do a lot of cool things with Terraform. Read more
Robert Ross 2020-10-23Testing Our Terraform Resources - Episode 5 of Throughput Thursdays
In this episode of Throughput Thursdays, we test our Terraform resources. If you missed it, you can watch it here. Read more
Robert Ross 2020-10-09Adding Two Terraform Resources - Episode 4 of Throughput Thursdays
In episode 4, we were able to achieve creating two full-blown Terraform resources for FireHydrant environments and functionalities. While simple resources, they unlock a lot of power that did not exist previously for teams that want to document their infrastructure using Terraform. Read more
Robert Ross 2020-10-02Fixing Some Code Sins - Episode 3 of Throughput Thursdays
In episode 3, we built a flexible API client for our Terraform provider that implements a really simple interface. We also wrote some simple but effective tests and replaced the original cruft in the provider code with our new API client. Read more
Robert Ross 2020-09-25Build Your API First
Going API first will save you headaches in the long run. This post shares why choosing to go API first from Day 1 will be a game-changer for your business, and the decisions we made at FireHydrant to do this. Read more
Robert Ross 2020-09-21Live from Cape Cod - Episode 2 of Throughput Thursdays
In Episode 2, Bobby is live in Cape Cod, sitting on a dock about 4 inches from the edge of a lake. Last week we built a skeleton of a Terraform provider. Now we’ll get the provider to create and delete resources, like services in FireHydrant. Read more
Robert Ross 2020-09-18We’re Building a Terraform Provider! - Episode 1 of Throughput Thursdays
In Episode 1, we started out the Terraform provider with a simple data resource against the FireHydrant API. We were able to successfully retrieve information about a single service and display its name in our terminal! Read more
Robert Ross 2020-09-11July Product Updates: Status Pages, Incident Redesign, and more
Fire hydrants usually have a firehose hooked up, and do we have a firehose of updates this July. We’ve been focused on making FireHydrant simpler to use and more deeply integrated with existing workflows to make managing your complex systems easier. Read more
Robert Ross 2020-07-17The Culture of the Codebase
We like to have fun when we build our product - read about how Rebecca Black's "Friday" snuck its way into our codebase. Read more
Robert Ross 2020-06-24Announcing Our Series A
For the past year we've seen over 50,000 hours of incidents, 20,000 runbook actions automated, and 10 million deploy events, and we're happy to announce our $8M Series A led by Menlo Ventures. Read more
Robert Ross 2020-05-20The Old Fashioned
Bobby shares his new hobby: making craft cocktails. In this post we’re going to make a classic: The Old Fashioned. Read more
Robert Ross 2020-04-21Avoid Institutionalized Incident Nonsense
How to get past the nonsense and look at problems differently. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-11-12Announcing Runbooks
Announcing our most powerful feature yet: FireHydrant Runbooks is a better way to automate your incidents. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-10-17NFS with Docker on macOS Catalina
You like living on the edge, life is fun on the edge until the edge is a macOS major update. Then you use vibrantly colorful words, some that your dead ancestors heard, all because your development environment now doesn’t work in spectacular fashion. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-10-08Open Source can be a Silver Bullet, but your Application Might be a Werewolf
A story about open source. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-09-22Dynamic Kubernetes Informers
How we updated our Kubernetes integration at FireHydrant. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-08-28Announcing our Statuspage.io Integration
Announcing our latest integration with Statuspage.io. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-08-223 Defensive Programming Techniques for Rails
Incidents happen all the time because of bad code deploys. Defensive programming is great for codifying how a bug could be introduced, and raising an error right before it would happen, or choosing an alternative path. Here are some simple ideas to defend yourself against simple mistakes. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-07-29A Gophers Guide to San Diego
The FireHydrant team is dominantly from San Diego, 3 of our 4 person team actually. We’re here to enjoy the awesome community that Go has been creating and to meet new faces. But we also wanted to give back a little with a small guide on food and drinks in Downtown San Diego. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-07-24Product Updates: July 2019
Our latest updates - let anyone open an incident in Slack, the launch of Severity Matrix, and a new integration with Jira. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-07-12Announcing Flare: Make Opening Incidents Stress Free
We’re launching a new feature today that allows anyone in your organization to kick off your incident response process with an appropriate severity level attached from Slack. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-06-28So You Want To Give A Tech Talk?
So you’ve signed up to give a tech talk, awesome! You’re a subject matter expert in something and want to share your knowledge, that’s what helps make a community awesome. You’re going to be speaking in front of a room of people that you don’t know in a place you’ve likely never been, talking about something you confidently know. Sounds easy, right? Read more
Robert Ross 2019-06-12New Features: Webhooks + Saved Searches
Read more about our latest releases - we've launched webhooks and now you can keep your frequent searches for later. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-06-03Severity Matrix Updates
We’re on a mission to make responding to incidents a bit less chaotic. One of the best features we offer (we’re definitely not biased, no way) is a simple way to define how a severity gets determined when you open an incident. We call it the severity matrix, and today it has a new look. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-05-28Rails without Webpacker
We recently removed webpacker from our Rails 5 application. This is a summary of the steps you can take to use vanilla webpack in your Rails application. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-05-28SLO, SLA, SLI Oh My! Creating Them Can Be Easy
How to get started on creating your SLO, SLA, and SLI's. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-05-16Instrumenting Ruby on Rails with Prometheus
If you’re running a production application, you need metrics. In the Rails community, this is commonly achieved with NewRelic and Skylight; but we achieve visibility using Prometheus and Grafana. Check out this guide on how to use Rails with Prometheus. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-05-05Understanding Istio Ingress
Istio is a hot technology right now. Giants such as Google and IBM have devoted entire teams of engineers to the project to push it to production readiness. Check out this post on getting to know Istio Ingress. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-05-02Develop a Go app with Docker Compose
Learn how to structure a Go application with Docker Compose as your development environment. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-05-01Developing a Ruby on Rails app with Docker Compose
Learn how to set up a new Rails app in Docker compose. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-05-01Flexible Ruby on Rails Reader Objects
Rails and ActiveRecord provide a simple interface for retrieving information from a database. With a few characters, I can retrieve all of my users with User.all. This simplicity is great, but it breaks down when you start doing more advanced queries. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-05-01New Releases: SSO, Post Mortem Generator
Our latest product releases: SSO, Post Mortem Generator. Today we're happy to announce our single sign-on support and updates to our postmortem functionality. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-05-01Stay Informed with Kubernetes Informers
FireHydrant has a changelog feature with a Kubernetes integration - read how our changelog works with Kubernetes. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-05-01How FireHydrant Creates Data in Rails
How FireHydrant is built to support creating data in our integration-ready platform. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-04-23New Feature: Incident Status Pages
Today we're happy to release our incident status page feature! If you operate within an organization that has stakeholders that need the gist of what's going on, how to respond to customers, and give a general feeling of "we're on it," this feature was built for you. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-04-11Announcing FireHydrant, a Tool to Manage Incidents
Today we're publicly launching FireHydrant, a tool to manage incidents. Read more about our journey. Read more
Robert Ross 2019-04-02